Telling the Other's side. Formulating others' mental states in driver training

This article examines ascriptions of mental states to other road users in live traffic driver training. Through this practice, instructors formulate how others make sense of the trainee driver's car. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we demonstrate how others' side formulations support trainee drivers' communicative handling of the car during ongoing coordination events. In contrast, formulations occurring after coordination events serve educational ends, yielding the generic inferential practices by which competent drivers make contextual sense of others' actions. Therefore, others' side formulations comprise an important instructional resource for introducing neophyte drivers into the real-world theorizing, rendering traffic its orderly social character.